Wednesday, December 09, 2015

This video shows a simulation of the space environment all the way out
to Pluto in the months surrounding New Horizons’ July 2015 flyby. At the
time, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Maryland, worked with the New Horizons team to test how well their
models—and other models contributed by scientists around the
world—predicted the space environment at Pluto. Understanding the
environment through which our spacecraft travel can ultimately help
protect them from radiation and other potentially damaging effects.
Visualizers at Goddard recently updated the movie of the model, creating
this new release. Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio, the Space Weather Research Center
(SWRC) and the Community-Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), Enlil and
Dusan Odstrcil (GMU).Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

This artist's concept depicts the New Horizons
spacecraft during its July 2015 encounter with Pluto and one of the
dwarf planet's moons, Charon. Credits: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

Though the vacuum of space is about a thousand times emptier than a
laboratory vacuum, it’s still not completely empty. The sun releases a
constant stream of particles called the solar wind—as well as occasional
denser clouds of particles known as coronal mass ejections, or
CMEs—both containing embedded magnetic fields. The density, speed, and
temperature of these particles, as well as the direction and strength of
the embedded magnetic fields, make up the space environment.

To map the space environment at Pluto, scientists combined the
predictions of several models—and looked at events that had long since
passed Earth.

"We set the simulation to start in January of 2015, because the
particles passing Pluto in July 2015 took some six months to make the
journey from the sun," said Dusan Odstrcil, a space weather scientist at
Goddard who created the Enlil model. The Enlil model, named for the
Sumerian god of the wind, is one of the primary models used to simulate
the space environment near Earth and is the basis for the New Horizons
simulation.

The new, combined model tracks CMEs longer than ever before. Because
particles must travel for many months before reaching Pluto, the CMEs
eventually spread out and merge with other CMEs and the solar wind to
form larger clouds of particles and magnetic field. These combined
clouds stretch out as they travel away from the sun, forming thin ring
shapes by the time they reach Pluto—quite different from the typical
balloon shape of CMEs seen here at Earth.